First off, thank you very much to Reza Negarestani for being here, for giving us the chance to hear one of his infamous Skype talks. Now I will introduce you to Reza Negarestani, very quickly, to pass directly to the words to Negarestani. Reza Negarestani is one of the most important philosophers of the XXI century. His work was extremely scarce, at the level of letterality. We have only two books,
but it was one of the most important works in the debate and one of the most incisive and innovative in the contemporary scene. The two works of Reza Negarestani are Ciclonopedia, which is released in 2011, and Intelligence on Spie, which is released last year. Ciclonopedia is an hybrid, which unies fiction, horror and critique, which is a paradoxical way, which is that the Middle-Orient is an being sentient. The Middle-Orient, with its petrol, its its sabbath, its its own, is an being that has had a terrifying impact on the global story, and has become a sort of a sort of concept character,
which Negaristan decided to describe in what China Meville, one of the most important authors of the past science of the past, has described it as an horror post-genre or an apocalisse teologica. Reza Negarist in this period has changed fortemente his own theory and today he will bring a talk much more inspired by his last book, Intelligence and Spirit. The base of Intelligence and Spirit is the one that he defines in humanism, That is the most important thing to do inhumanism, that is the becoming inhuman human. If the human is not considered more as an entity, or with a sort of spirit in order to give the human nature,
the human becomes inhuman. It becomes a perpetuity of himself within the story. a structure rational, a structure, we could say, biographic and biographic of the human being. Reza Negarestani starts from this thesis and has written a 700 pages so I will not resume here. In this talk we will talk about something for a more simple, from a certain point of view, more close to the interests of many professors within our department, the relationship between the forms of life, the Lebensformen of Wittgenstein, and his effective project of neo-razionalism. I won't say anything because I would like to pass immediately the word Negarestani and maybe an deep dive into your project
more broad and general, or leave us for the end so that we will create a conversation with one of the user's most interesting on the contemporary panorama. Thank you. Reza, you can go. First, I would like to start with a synopsis that encapsulates the overall theme of this presentation and the structure of its arguments. In philosophical investigations, Wittgenstein uses the term Lebensform, translated to life form or form of life. Only five times. Yet, despite this aspiring use, the term occurs at key moments, that is, in cryptic
passages, where Wittgenstein's philosophy of life, philosophy of language, and the life of philosophy, twine together. What I am going to do in this presentation is to elaborate on the concepts of life form as employed within the study rather than gambit. In order to show that it both suggests life as a field of possibilities afforded by logic and language, and more importantly, the possibility of rationally imagining and constructing different life forms, Levin's formula.
Indeed, the question of life form, which is the philosophical question of what life is, already implies the plurality of life forms as constructible and not merely given the possibilities. So, So if life or we design is simply the world, then life form is also a world, insofar as it is what life ultimately is. To speak of life without a world, a form that oscillates between material and noetic, that
is to say linguistic, logical, computational problems between sensibility and cognition is an empty deal, a vitalistic fallacy so to speak. Now to the extent that the world and it implies the plurality of life forms, it also implies the plurality of life. Not possible worlds of the kind motor realists espouse, but actual worlds, no less actual than the actuality of the world of humans as a life form.
But where do these worlds, who are life forms come from? They are not merely natural or given. They are not of sentient beasts, rocks, warden shoes, usps, and termites. Instead, constructions whose elements or building blocks are borrowed from one other than our world, from humanity as a life form, and our experiences which recognize and make our world's life forms.
Having outlined the premises, this presentation takes the deep life of a world underlying the significance of the Artificial General Intelligence Research Program. as a distinctly equal enterprise, not withstanding its technological, political or ideological Just the very idea. In fact, as a philosophy, that is the intersection of philosophy of life, philosophy of language,
and the life of philosophy. In short, philosophy is philosophy we conceive as a view from nowhere and nowhere. His task is to systematically constitute and construct life worlds for worlds, not alien, and unintelligent nominal worlds, but worlds which are ways of living about this world of ours, the human life, as well as being spectators or apertures into the space of disciplines of life from a standpoint that is not strictly limited
to here and now, but of our whole human experience. for that matter it can be truly seen as a from nowhere and when what what is like the worlds which are constructed from human life from our world as a springs or other the answer that the artificial machine I say explicitly because our world or form of life is no less
artificial or constructible than these life forms who are worlds. We are all tangled in the maze of language and conception which organize and inform our experiences of ourselves in the world. But for us, the language is taken for granted as something natural and to a certain degree ineffable and pre-logical. The moment we become self-conscious of the nature of language, not as a medium of human communication, but as a vast logical computational framework that can be diversified and constructed out of the bounds of sense,
we are in the domain of imagining new languages, and hence new life forms. As Wittgenstein remarks, to imagine a life form is to imagine a language. To live as a life form is for its members to share a space of possibilities. Form is a field of possibilities and language or what I would call a general artificial language in this sense is the most expansive space of possibilities without which the intelligibility life is voided and its possibilities remain untapped. General artificial
languages ought not be imagined as necessarily having words or even tenses. We can imagine them as having explicit logical, computational, or probabilistic properties such as for example a language built on Carnap's logical syntax and logical induction indeed in the fourth chapter of logical foundations of probability Rodolf Carnap intimates the prospects of a computer built on the principles of logical syntax and logical induction
Once we attain the consciousness of the fact that imagining language as a space of possibilities is imagining life forms and worlds different than ours, the Heideggerian Lebensraum, living space, will be crumbled at the foot of Lebensformen, life forms. Only artifacts have a history. And only the forms of life have a history rather than a mere nature, which will continue the timeless life of ideas in the Hegelian sense. Living a species will perish, but life forms will endure.
In line with this dictum, we can think about computers in the most general sense as constructed lenses looking into what humanity, our life form, our life world is. What is the computer if not a determination of what the human is not and what it can be? And what it can be from a perspective that is methodically put together by our various informed assumptions and critiques is is but a historical template which is disposed to further construction.
To this end, this presentation will engage with computers generally understood along the lines of life forms, language and world making. In the Nelson Goodmanian sense, ways of world making. Whatever we can ever imagine about other worlds and life forms is based on the critique and construction of the particular life form we possess. The specific actual world we already inhabit. philosophy is always, however, a view from nowhere and no one. A global recipe to construct other worlds from whose viewpoints
our world will be rendered ever smaller and cosmologically myopic. In a nutshell, all philosophy is about is the is the question of what can be done through life and for life, as the space of possibilities, as inseparable from form. A philosophy that takes at its premise death and extinction is not philosophy, but a self-defeating ideological fixation, A sleight of intellectual hand that once parasitizes on the resources of life form and life as a world that ought to be recognized.
For every cognition is a recognition. All such a myth knows about is a life bereft of form. A life that comes as noetically free. just like a tree that is not accompanied by the concept of a tree. Well, what is a tree without the concept of tree? How can we think like a tree to understand what its world can possibly be without having a renewable conception of it, the language it might or might not have? How is it possible to think of life without a form that is neither given nor restricted to the conceptual resources we have at this time to think about life?
A nihilist tends to reduce the life form to the question of bare life. There is a life without form, and to the extent that life will extinguish, the nihilist sees extinction as the truth of the human and all life forms. By separating the question of life from its form, by reducing life forms to life, the nihilist does indeed begin his position from the same premise that undergirds the position of a fanatic vitalist, namely the empty idea of life without form, which can be deflated
or disenchanted by a nihilist or inflated and enchanted by a vitalist. But if the question of life as conceived here and now is a historical illusion rooted in mistaking the incompleteness of our history or a completed totality, then what does it mean to see life as a space of possibilities, not given by what we think of life in our own narrow conception of life as a human life form, but afforded by a formal idea or a concept that stands for a network of different relationships
between humans and is thus amenable to reconstruction i.e different conceptions of the human. What is important here is that as Wittgenstein has suggested, words like human and life are not classes of entities that signify actual things or beings. They are not grounded on attributes, fixed properties, or common denominators, which can be added or removed from living beings at whim. In fact, for Wittgenstein, one of the greatest philosophical sins is to understand human
and life as categorical concepts. Instead, life and human are formal concepts which are neither categorical, i.e. pertaining to a particular class, nor fixed. Difference and possibilities of diversification in such concepts arise from their formality rather than from anything extraneous to their form. For example, regardless of differences in attributes and properties, X and Y can be called human as long as they share the same form.
As such, both concepts of the human and life remain open instead of being closed under a particular definition. Their openness originates from the fact that they are not predetermined concepts, but complicated networks of similarities, overlapping and crisscrossing, or Wittgenstein calls networks of family resemblance, which are not based on a single shared property, but rather can be thought in his words as created by its spinning a multiplicity of fibers that overlap with each
other. Of course the strength of this thread is not affected by the fact that there is no single fiber that runs through its whole length. Here we can of course think of Charles Anders Peir's metaphor of the cable, which is not a chain, like the chain of beings. It is rather a cable whose fibers may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected. This form of understanding the concept of life and the human is not by any means underdetermined. It is, on the other hand, healthy, anti-essentialist, and anti-foundationalist.
It allows us to imagine a life form as a community or a collective whose members don't need to share a class of attributes or a property for them to be counted as representatives of their life form. Furthermore, this view of the concept of the human and life enables us to finally see different classes of life as resting upon nothing more and nothing less than a form qua a field of possibilities, which can be shared and transferred from one member to another, but also be actively engaged as an open source construction
within which other life forms and worlds can be imagined and actualized. And what is human if not an open source concept? In this sense, what are computers or logical machines, if not other life forms, born out of the suppleness of concept networks such as life and the human? And for that matter, extensions of our history in a different class of life rather than the discontinuation of our history. Having cursorily gone through what is at the stake here, i.e. the systematic thought of
different life forms or different worlds as a very task of philosophy, we can now begin to say that what all life forms will eventually do, the kind of performative task that defines them all, is to imagine and construct what other kinds of life forms will be born out of them. In other words, in living in an intelligible world for a life form one ends up speculating and ultimately constructing different worlds and life forms which are not unintelligible in principle. I think that I
am a human but in my provincial idea of humanity I wander across the oceans of of time, where the concept of human is broken into pieces and is reinvented anew. I cling to this idea that once you become self-conscious of yourself as a representative of a life form rather than mere life, you are on your way to construct other worlds and other life forms. Essentially you are in the business of artificialization as an
explicit project. Section 2. How a life form can reinvent life. Once the first humans, us, were shattered upon the wall of future, a new human was born, half an etching into the stone and half a computer. Its petrified remains lasted for some time and were eventually erased by the vagaries of different ages. Whereas its true form, a computational machine, a form of life, evolved with time and became one with universe of which it was a part.
This is how Olaf Stapleton's novel, Last and First Men, begins and ends. Over the course of two billion years from now. Now are the first humans. The fact that we are living in the prehistory of intelligence should not be regarded as a debilitating moment of understanding, one that leads to dispotency about our fate as humans. as homo sapiens, namely as a species, we will be subjected to what Thomas Hardy, with a nod to Darwin, has called the mean times,
turning us into relics of natural history. And this is Thomas Hardy's quote from A Pair of Blue Eyes. The creature represented but a low time of animal existence. So essentially, this is a moment where basically the term cliffhanger was invented. The hero, Knight, falls off the cliff, and as he's trying to struggle to save his life, he sees a stone, and inside this stone he sees eyes, a fossil of deep time.
So the creature represented but a low type of animal existence, for never in their vernal years had the planes indicated by those numberless, slaty layers been traversed by an intelligence worthy of the name, zoofights, mollusca, shellfish were the highest developments of those ancient days. The immense lapses of time each formation represented had known nothing of the dignity of man. They were grand times, but they were mean times too. And mean were their relics. He was to be with the small in his death.
So, as I mentioned, as Homo sapiens, we will be subjected to what Thomas Hardy, with a nod to Darwin, has called the mean times, turning into relics of natural history. Yet as a life form, Wittgenstein-Levon's form, we as first humans will be replaced by other life forms, not through the course of natural history or deep time, Darwinian deep time, but by the very definition that we are partaking in a life form.
To partake in a life-form such as human means to explore and construct the concept of the human. For a life-form is not a species that simply dies, but a flux of life that is determined by the form of its social practices shared among its members. perceptual and noetic images of itself are formed by language which is through and through collectively practiced and shaped. Yet, insofar as the social or cultural practices which constitute the language can evolve or can be reconfigured such that the nature of language changes in the
process, a life form can outlive its specific and contingent historical format, such as Homo sapiens as a biological species. Within this thesis on the endurance and the evolution of Lebensformin life forms, or the idea of the human a la Hegel, there lies the ultimate import of artificial intelligence, not as a technological hubris or a juvenile flight of fancy about the singularity yet to come, but as a systematic investigation of life forms and how they navigate an incomplete historical landscape, which is called the human.
Five dual concepts. define artificial intelligence as an investigation of life forms, both from the historical perspective of here and now, and from the perspective of view from nowhere and nowhere, i.e. the possibilities of how life forms can evolve and diversify. These five dual concepts are language and computation. language and experience, experience and history, history and wandering in time, namely evolution, life forms and machinic practices. Let's look briefly at how these five dual concepts interconnect.
We have individual perceptions and experiences of ourselves and the world to the extent that we share language, we have experiences to the extent that our experiences are fundamentally intersubjective, passing through a common language or languages which can be interpreted by the community members of a specific language. Every language is constituted at its base by certain social practices or ways of doing and saying, which also determine what we historically see or experience ourselves and the world as X or Y,
namely a form of life. Yet these social practices are not any kind of social practices. They are, at the bottom, logical and computational. In nature, the noise, dot red dots has no meaning no organizational capacity for our experiences unless and until it enters into an interaction between different interlocutors the essence of this interaction can be understood as a confrontation of elementary actions hence interaction between players or agents whose moves establish the rules of a game, which in turn give meanings and context
to the sign noises such as dot red dot. Similar to how the rules of chess classify what kind of moves chess pieces can perform. Yet at its basis the concept of life form is not about established rules to which we are bound. It is embedded in the idea of play. For example, Goodman's toy aesthetics or world making, which hopefully I will unpack it during the question and answers because I would say I think that it will prolong this presentation. That we share as an activity.
if play precedes the game for example like a child play with a Lego set you know a Lego set you know these Lego kits that comes like a Death Star and you have it for your birthday in 1982 and you are never going to make a Death Star as a child you are actually making dragons kitchen out of it right So if play precedes the game, and if lifeform is more on the side of play and tinker toys than games and their rules, then to inhabit a lifeform means to play around with the form
and the world to reinvent them as new lifeforms and world versions. We can imagine this computational or machining conception of social practices, which form our individual and historical experiences, might actually lead to ever more generalized forms of language with higher expressive powers and computational capacities. In line with this postulate, we can further imagine new life forms or constructs of two vectors of reformatting of the Homo sapiens, one from below and the other from the above. respectively the reconfiguration of our particular natural history by artificial means such that for
example the human brain is reconstructed by a more powerful statistical by more powerful statistical and neural models as we are seeing today. And then the substitution of a language, natural language, and its conceptual inferential resources by languages with explicit logical and computational properties. It is through the intertwinement of these two vectors, i.e. artificialization from below, from sensation up to cognition, and then from cognition to sensation from the top, that we can conjecture about machinic life forms whose histories are the continuation of the idea
of the human, yet unburdened by our immature history. Thinking otherwise would mean that we do indeed restrict the notion of history as a time of the idea of the human to our particular instantiation as humans here and now. And thus, we implicitly endorse the well-worn dictum, the Aristotelian dictum, that Homo sapiens is the apex of history. In other words, we end up confounding natural history, which is always contingent with regard to a life form with the artificial history of what it means to be human, to construct
human and explore the networks of what we can assign would have called the networks of similarities, overlapping and crisscrossing, family resemblances. Natural history may be unbound, but it is not a history as such. its unboundedness is blind to what life forms come and go. Whereas an idea, with capital I, example that what it means to be human is thoroughly a construct, an artifact. Yet only life forms have a notion of history. To have a history, one has to have a concept of oneself and the world.
and to have a concept, one must have a public language. It is in this sense that the gradual machinic transformation of our particular social practices, which constitute the form of our life and through which our notion of history is shaped, coincides with an unbound history, which is the history of the idea and not beings. or a species. Life forms in this sense should strictly be conceived as machines because only machines whether supported by synthetic, organic, inorganic or purely inorganic structures
retain an idea or in this case the concept of the human given the fact that they are constructible. You cannot identify the idea of the machine unless you have a system of construction, just like you. Everything that intimates natural entities or species will capitulate to the Darwinian deep time at the end of the day. It will become a fossil as an omen of indifferent mean times. The question of what it means to be human has always been the question of what it means to be a machine as a construction system.
A constructible constellation whose history is as vast as the possibilities of its reconstruction and recognitions. Machinic life forms of which we are a rudimentary exemplification see their histories as a systematic navigation or wandering in the dense forests of time where rainbows change their colors where trees are at once green and blue grew Nelson Goodman's projection grew and where any earth hole is always descending into an abyss called cosmological possibilities, into the
field or form of life which is beyond what is now the case. Thank you. So thank you very much Redza. It's a it's a fantastic talk and I think I'm gonna start with one question and then I'll maybe pass around. If someone wants to ask a question in Italian, I can translate it and ask it later.
So I'll start with a couple of questions which I think can intersect quite well with our seminar in general. First off, there's a quite strong Heideggerian lineage of thought in the organizers of this seminar. Some of us were... I pretend that I didn't hear that. what what I wanted to ask you about this is could you maybe explain further the problem with a philosophy that starts from death as a sort of ontological
prime mover and elaborate on that. It's essentially a quite a simple formula that philosophers have whitewashed over the course of history. You see, death is not a blow to a life form, Because a life form is life as conceived by a form, and form is enduring, like the idea of the human in a Hegelian sense, right? It is not just a species. It's not just about matter and natural objects and entities, right? So, death is only giving the hardest blow, the ultimate blow, to what you might call to be a life bereft of form.
It can kill all sorts of natural objects in time, right? But, what about the life form? essentially to in fact first to in fact realize the fact of death the inevitable fact of death as the you know ultimate below to basically the vagaries of a species and beings but also to understand that life the meat that the concept of life without is an empty idea, with these two understanding, then how can death can be
taken as a premise? If not, you're already smuggling the idea of pure life into the equation, just like a vitalist. Because if your premise was a life form, then you couldn't posit death as the premise or as the ultimate ground. Yeah, I think this kind of intersects pretty well with the second question, which I think you kind of see coming. I believe that the Heideggerians, in this sense, has a sort of strong point about death. When they talk about death, they are also talking about alterity
and otherness and they are sort of um how can i say it they are putting a sort of transcendence into life so life is meaningful or transcendence transcendence transcendence as as otherness i'd say so they can kind of justify their the idea that uh there's a form to human an authentic and authentic form to human life via this sort of transcendence through death. So understanding this gives me a sort of computational power to see myself as a species, whatever. It kind of discloses this possibility to put myself above natural history, in a sense.
At the same time, I would say that making this move, yes, absolutely, it allows you to have a certain kind of recognition of yourself as a life form, right? Like humans. But I would say that at the end of the day, it's quite parochial, precisely because it entitles you, it allows you to recognize yourself as human, but it does not allow you to reconstruct the concept of human, precisely because the human is no longer within this. You see, Hegel has a great idea that any philosophy that starts with finitude is a bad philosophy.
It's a sick philosophy. It's riven with disease. So if you think that death actually applies to the concept of human, then you're obviously at some point alighting the distinction, making a weaselly move to conflate the distinction between human as being and human as a formal concept, or Hegel's idea. Now, within the domain of death, yes, human as a species will absolutely, as I mentioned,
will perish, becomes a fossil. But, in the domain of the idea, death doesn't apply to it. In fact, it is only through the idea that we can arrive at the fact of death. else can we see death as opposed to life? Yeah, I kind of see your point. I understand where you're coming from and I understand your critique, but I would like to ask like the final question, which is gonna be pretty harsh. Don't you think it's a little problematic to sort of put a deep cut in natural history and say here's the human which is a
form which is not bound to its disappearance from the planet and then there's the rest there's the other life forms which are bound to disappear but they do not know that they're otherwise I actually mentioned quite as specifically that by life forms I don't mean you know a tree there is a squirrel out there I can see it in the yard I don't mean these kinds of stuff there are not life forms life forms are only life forms by virtue of having the consciousness of their form and that form is only given by
true language, logic. So, from this perspective, it is not as if I am saying that you know, there are life forms out there and also we are life forms and there is a deep cut, as you said, it's within our natural history that suddenly we became, you know, conscious of the form. No, no, no, that is not. In fact, I'm completely opposed to this kind of what you might call to be pseudo-Platonistic.
I would say that Plato would have never actually come up with this idea. I would call this, that's why I call it a pseudo-Platonic idea. there is a deep cut in the natural history. No, no, no. The first thing is that, so the furniture of language have been afforded to us by way of natural processes, right? But it would be a total mistake to confuse the natural evolution of language with what actually language can do or possibly can perform.
These are two different things. And that's the whole idea of Hegelian self-consciousness. Self-consciousness is the moment that you are given a certain kind of what Hegel calls the design of the geist. And that design of geist, even though it has evolved naturally, nevertheless allows us to see things, to actually see the natural evolution. Because otherwise, without it, there wouldn't be any concept of natural evolution, deep cut, so on and so forth. It would be, I would say, absurd
to think that we could, in fact, think about Darwinian deep time without the formal resources of our systematic theorizations in sciences. someone wants to ask? I think it's a question. I think it's a problem with this, this is a very difficult question. It seems a bit problematic to see this, the form of human life, the consciousness, the consciousness, and the non-human,
I think it's only a lot of intelligence, I think that the human being was very clear, but how animal is, human, etc. I've talked about these forms of life as evolution and diversification, through language and communication, and in which way this thing can be extended to the evolution of biological science, in the moment we are going to extend it Okay, so they're doubling down on my question.
What they're saying is that they also find problematic this strong distinction between a sort of natural history and an artificial intelligence, so to speak. Because as they say, there's like this problem where you have natural history, which is diversifying also basically by itself. And there's a sort of continuity. And then all the life forms you talk about, the sort of conceptual forms, which are kind of grown out of, you know, artificial intelligence where the continuity is clear, but there seems to be a sort of rupture between natural laws and the laws of language, logic, computation, and so forth.
There is no such a thing as laws of language. There are rules, and rules are constructible, Whereas laws of nature basically are sort of kinds of theoretically derived invariances, right? So the thing is that it's not that as if I am making a fundamental distinction between natural history and to have a history in the sense of Levin's formula. I think that, so, nevertheless, I am completely against Daniel Dennett's position.
Because Daniel Dennett's position in Darwin, The Dangerous Idea, is exactly like that. So, essentially, natural evolution is being seen as algorithms, you know, self-correcting algorithms. that basically create a design space. Essentially, that's what evolution is. It's a design space within which algorithms clash and rectify one another. But the thing is that, yeah, I'm pro the idea of design space, but I think that it is fundamentally a very naive physicalistic thesis to think that first you could actually arrive at the concept of algorithm
without certain kinds of, you know, refinable rules within language, either natural or formal, or that simply by virtue that the rules are undergirded by constraints of natural laws are reducible to them. That I would call just basically one-on-one physicalistic fallacy. So you think there's a sort of heterogeneous nature between the laws and the rules of logic, the laws of nature and the rules of logic, because the rules of logic are constructible.
So there is a sort of... Constructible, yes, and the origin is not really nature as such, but as Wittgenstein would have said, life forms, language games, interactions. What's your question? Yes, I'm sorry.
Okay, so what they're asking is, it's a really interesting question, what they're saying is when you say that rules, that human coincides with the sort of rules he makes for himself, So, and rules are based on other constructible rules, so to speak. So therefore, rules come from a sort of anthropocentric point of view. So it's other humans and other intersubjective relations which construct rules for one another.
The question is, don't you think that this clashes with what we could call a post-human philosophy, a philosophy which takes into account a wider set of agents and a sort of politics for everybody, so to speak? First of all, I remember that I quite emphasized on this point at the middle of the presentation, that humans are not divided by rules. rules are more like historical ossifications of what can possibly
be done within a community of life forms as Mithkaner Stein would have said it so essentially as I said play precedes the rules life forms are more like play whereas this rather totalized image of the human is the ossification of the kind of rules that we have historically applied to ourselves. But if we go back and see the very idea of where the concept of human unfolds, Allah we can assign, as a network of family resemblances, then we are in the business of play.
it's essentially we have the same thing in for example Jean-Yves Girard's idea that logic should not be understood by way of rules rather we have to invent or discover the logic of rules how rules come about and basically are applied to different things. So within that sense, I think that, yes, there is definitely a difficulty here. So we have one human in a witness science sense, which is not close under a definition
and is more of a play, world building, constructing life forms. And the other is what you might call to be the ossification, the historical ossification of plays into rules or games, which impart certain kinds of constraints of what we can do or what we cannot. I think that we cannot simply take side with one or another. It would be ahistorical to simply go for this idea of free play concept of human. And it would be myopically historical as a totalization,
achieved or complete totalization to take for granted the idea of human practices as defined by the kind of rules that have been given to us historically. I would say that we have to oscillate between these two. Any sort of, you know, bipolarization here will lead into unwanted consequences. Bad post-humanism, bad humanism, all sorts of stuff. so I'm gonna sort of go back on this because I think it's very interesting if you could maybe
talk a little more about game like what do you mean by play the primacy of play maybe just a little bit because I know that your philosophy is very wide on this and it's been The concept of play, I would say that one of the greatest philosophers who actually has thought about it, other than Wittgenstein, late Wittgenstein, is Nelson Goodman. You see, Nelson Goodman sees, for Nelson Goodman there is no undergirding reality. Sorry, he's an irrealist, right? the reason that he denounces the concept of an undergirding or final reality is precisely because he says quite explicitly that,
okay, so people who are actually, you know, go for idea of a fundamental reality or stuff out there usually are modal realists. And all they want is that, okay, so the kind of structures that we project onto reality, they need to have a target system. You need to have some stuff out there to which you project the structure, right? But he says, which I am actually, I'm quite fond of this, but I need to think about this even more. it says that this concept of underlying reality or stuff is the most useless concept philosophy has ever invented.
Because reality should be ontologically neutral. So if otherwise you basically find yourself in the business of the myth of the given, right? So if reality is neutral, then why do you need to add it? to the equation on the basis of the principle of parsimony. You don't need to add this kind of bloatware, metaphysical bloatware, to your claims that you make. So the notion of reality is out of the window. But the second horn of basically Goodman's dilemma is that what we call reality is in fact the labor of projection.
Or what he calls projectables. Essentially, there is no such a thing as reality out there. we project our predicates like green and blue onto the stuff out there and that's how we see a reality but then we can also think about creating different projections or projectables such as you know his famous example so usually we say that all emeralds are green before time t1 after a hypothetical future time t2
based on observations that we have all emeralds shall be considered as green. Now Nelson Goodman says that no this is just a stupid idea you can in fact come up with a different predicate a toy predicate precisely because it's a form of play that all emeralds before time t1 are green and afterwards and observed and afterwards they are blue. It's not that emerald for some reason, some radioactive reason has changed its color. No, no,
no. It's just that you can apply these predicates like this and it is as legitimate and even more accurate than the predicate green. Gru is more accurate than the predicate green. The only reason that we are not using it precisely because we are habituated to a space of rules, of perceptions and conceptions. we are acclimatized to the predicate green and the rules that instantiate it and allows us to apply it rather than the more accurate and complex predicate group.
So you see, this is the kind of difference between rule, game and play. crew on the side of play, green on the side of the road. Wittgenstein, I would say, and even late Goodman, they try to invert this equation by saying that in fact, rules of a game are ossifications, cultural ossifications of certain kinds of free plays. the reason that we are using green is precisely because we have habituated to
certain kind of constructabilities of a play free play and now we take them as rules and hence a game yeah I'm gonna just go with another question because I think it's pretty interesting A lot of people do not know your philosophy right now, and my introduction was very, very quick. But I said that you are sort of an offshot of the so-called speculative realism. But what you just said is the polar opposite of, I don't know, Maurizio Ferrari's new realism. Could you maybe say a little bit about your relation to speculative realism and your actual philosophy and how you came to these positions?
Yes. Well, it's kind of a little bit hard, but I try to my best. Essentially, you know, it was not as if I basically identified myself as a speculative realist. I was bunched together with a bunch of other people who actually didn't agree on the idea of speculative realism. I think that speculative realism from the start was misguided. So essentially it's a number of people who are disagreeing, who are agreeing on the flaws of certain kind of philosophy, culture, actually, from Kant onwards, right?
But to share this agreement doesn't mean that you are having agreements, right? And it just became quite obvious between Ray Broussier, Graham Harmon, you know, Ian Hamilton Graham and Quentin Masso. But I would say that there is still something that can be recuperated from speculative realism. But my version is this, that the idea of speculation is still worth entertaining. Speculating not as whimsical imagination about Popeye, lava lamps, you know, vacuum sealed garbage bags with objects inside them.
No, no. Something more like a Hegelian idea of speculation. So what Hegel meant by speculation is to suspend the immediacy of the state of affairs. And it's the task of philosophy to do that. Isn't it the whole idea of the view from nowhere and nowhere? to think beyond the immediacy of the state of affairs. Marx communism is also, in that sense, speculative fundamentally. I mean, in German ideology, Marx and Engels identify communist hypothesis with the understanding that it's a real movement that suspends or abolishes the current state of affairs, the order of things, right?
So this is what speculation is. A good example that I have for you within the history of science about how speculation might look like is the history of lens picking. So Galileo made the perfect lens. You know. And he made a telescope looking into the sky above. Espinosa was, you know, a little bit more interesting. And Kepler used Espinosa's model.
It was, you know, basically, his lens was made by hand. So it had to fall on. and Kepler noticed something really interesting that certain kind of lenses that have imperfections can actually reveal something more about death of celestial bodies but he didn't understand the whole principle So, Hoijans finally sealed the deal, paving the road for Newtonian revolution, in the sense that he made two perfect lenses.
But these lenses were non-arbitrary, in fact, intentionally, were made by certain kinds of tractable, investigatable flaws. and he put these two lenses together, made a telescope. What this telescope did is that it shadowed the rims of the telescope. So you are looking, you know, from a circle. You are looking into the skies. So on the rim, every object is blared in shadows. This blaring allows you to focus on something deeper.
This is what a speculation is. And his name of telescope was a speculum telescope. So we could say that... There's a question, but I'm going to just add a thing because you told me this story so many times that I have to add it. So, I mean, you could say that speculation is actually not a purposeful but a useful misreading of whatever happens a sort of useful aberration yes not only useful but tractable precisely because espinoza's you know handmade lenses have so many flaws that you couldn't actually track what is going wrong with this lens
right? The whole point is tractability. You can basically trace what is actually going wrong before arriving what is right. Yeah, there is one question. and the possibilities of this environment, and the future. And then, I also want to investigate systematically the new form of life. This is already the first question. We can define or build a new human concept in which we are aware of the intelligence,
of the human life, etc. Allora, the first question is how can I say that this characterizes the philosophy as a look from any part or from any place? And I can understand how to take the means of the fact that I am the limit for which I emerge in the world. I can understand that I can understand the meaning as a game. but also a microcox, to be such a rule, must be a rule. So, even if you understand, the view is not in any part or at any time. It is not the intention to build a concept that takes away from what I'm doing.
So, my question is, how much desire is to build a new human concept rather than to see what human is? Okay, it's a rather big one, the phenomenologists. Okay, the question is, so you sort of exposed this philosophy of play, but you also said that this philosophy of play, this philosophy of rule-based games, it's a point of view from nowhere and no end. Play, not rulemaking. Rulemaking is always here and now. Okay. Play precedes rules.
It's essentially the whole idea that, for example, we as humans are life forms, but we tend to actually conflate our life form with the apex of the class of entities, such as beings. You know, Arcotelian flaw. And that's exactly where the question is going, because the question is very precise on this point. And I think it makes a great critique of the concept of a point of view from nowhere and no when. Because from the moment you're saying that we are sort of inspecting the ossification of the rules which led us here, in a sense, you're always doing it from a very specific point of view.
You're always doing it as... Absolutely, that's the whole point. As I mentioned, you cannot make worlds out of blue. New worlds are not just like alien entities, unicorns out there, butterflies, like dragons. Every sort of world that we can ever make is from the ingredients of our worlds. So there is kind of a double movement here. One, we accede to the fact that every world that can be made, no matter how different, is made from the ingredients of our own worlds, of our own games, right, and rules.
That's one. too. But then how can we simply go from ossify the rules of our games to make new worlds? That's not possible. We have to go back to the origin of where the rules came from, which is play. And that's what I call world making. because the the question was actually how can you say that this is a point of view from nowhere and no end if you're talking from a very specific phenomenological and also existential position yeah if you're talking about my rules and my ossified history how is this how can you
The moment that we create a different life form, namely a world, we are in the business of a view from nowhere and nowhere. Relative to the world of here and now that we do inhabit. Let me tell you a good example of this in the history of science. The earth moves versus the earth is at rest. Obviously, from the history of science perspective, the Copernican formula of Earth moves versus Ptolemaic claim or statement that Earth is at rest, there is no big gap between them.
Copernicus simply corrected the world of Ptolemaic. But look at these two statements. They are contradictory, in fact. Yeah, because I think there's also, you know, the Hoserial problem which was raised here is that there's a great difficulty of saying, how can I speak from nowhere and no when? There is a sort of practical impossibility, I'd say, to actually assume... If I can talk about it, you only construct something with a broader scope of statements, consistency, truths, and then from the perspective of that,
world. You might say that this is a view from nowhere and nowhere with regard to the older world. Just like the Copernican statement that Earth moves according to the heliocentric frame the Earth moves with regard to the frame of reference according to the geocentric frame of reference the Earth is at risk. Yeah, because this sort of had a second question nested within it. And the question was, which I think you also kind of already answered to it, if you'd rather construct new worlds or inspect
deossified rules and laws which actually are behind our back, in a sense. That's a really fantastic question. I really need to think about it. But I would say that Wittgenstein probably would have said that construction is a very organ of investigation. So has Carnap. Literally, you cannot investigate without constructing. I mean, isn't it really the whole point of Carnap's cursed book of Baal, Logical Structure of the World? I mean, many people who are unfamiliar with Carnap think that basically the point of, and he's not positive, really, he's a logical empiricist. It's that, you know, he's trying to create some foundations
for how possibly experience can be thought or reconstructed, logically reconstructed. But this is absolutely not true. Erlamps, or what he calls elementary experiences, are just like pre-theoretical slices of experience, simply denominated by a space and time coordinates and a sort of, you know, family resemblances and so on and so forth, from which he tries to construct experience to the extent that Karna actually claims that you cannot talk about experience if you haven't managed to logically reconstruct it. yeah so the question is not either or but it's yes both of them yes yes
so i'll go with a final one just to sort of reconstruct your philosophy because we didn't have the chance to actually delve into it. Now you're a universalist, a rationalist, a Wittgensteinian, a Carnapian, but how does Cyclonopedia fit into all of this? Is there a way you think there's a sort of coherent structure to your philosophy, or is there actually, as in Wittgenstein, two different authors writing two different books, which might converge on some points, but are actually extremely different. Sure. My first impulse would be to say that absolutely it has nothing to do with me.
I didn't even write this book. But I think I need to be honest with myself. And I would say that, yes, Cyclonopedia is born out of this certain kind of, you know, this kind of construction. Even though the construction is flawed, ultimately, but it is essentially a constructive work. that through a construction of certain kinds of fictional premises, you see how, for example, the Middle East or geostrategical positions are unfolding. So in that sense, yes, I would say that, in fact,
all of my philosophical life I have believed in construction, but I just didn't take it as an explicit fact. the whole idea that construction is nothing but investigation and critique and critique is nothing but construction okay perfect thank you very much we're done thank you so much Thank you. Have a great day and thank you so much again for all your hospitality.